'Good things will come': Padres' roller-coaster 2024 continues in loss (2024)

SAN DIEGO -- With a chance to complete their first sweep of the season, with a chance to move three games above .500 for the first time all year, the Padres finished their homestand with a dud on Wednesday afternoon: a 9-1 loss to the Marlins at Petco Park.

Not much went right for the Padres, who rode an encouraging three-game winning streak into the matchup. They didn’t pitch well. They were leaky on defense. They ran into an out on the basepaths.

“It just wasn't very clean,” said manager Mike Shildt. “We haven't had many of those. We didn't help ourselves.”

And, so, the roller coaster continues. Every time the Padres have seemed ready to bottom out this season, they’ve fought back with resilience. The reverse has held true, too. Every time San Diego has seemed ready to hit its stride, it has faltered.

Which is a long way of saying that, the Padres have mostly played like a .500 ballclub. And, sure enough, with four long months remaining they sit at 30-29, hovering on the fringe of the playoff picture.

“There's ups and downs, there's good and there's bad, and there's a lot in between,” said Manny Machado. “It's the beauty of this game. That's why I love it. It's a ride.”

Now, about those next four months. One critical question feels likely to decide this Padres’ season: Do their stars start playing like stars? Or do their role players stop playing like stars and start playing like role players?

Right now, it feels impossible to guess which direction that pendulum will swing. The likeliest outcome probably features a bit of regression in both directions: San Diego's stars playing more like stars and their role players playing more like role players. But there are two ends of that pendulum.

As for the stars? The Padres have five players signed to nine-figure contracts -- Xander Bogaerts, Machado, Fernando Tatis Jr., Yu Darvish and Joe Musgrove.

Bogaerts, after a poor start, is on the IL with a fracture in his left shoulder. Machado, who made a pair of defensive miscues at third base, has a .651 OPS. Tatis, who was thrown out trying to stretch a single into a double amid a five-run deficit, is “not swaggy right now” by his own admission. Musgrove and Darvish have spent time on the IL this year and have yet to find a rhythm.

Now Darvish, who exited Wednesday's start after just three innings, is potentially dealing with further injury trouble. After the game, Shildt revealed that Darvish had been pitching through left hamstring tightness. Darvish was sent for further testing after the game.

"It wasn't overly significant, but he felt it,” Shildt said. “[The ball] was still coming out good. He was pitching pretty well. But he had the longer inning in the third, and it just made sense to go to the bullpen.”

That bullpen, so reliable over the past couple weeks, couldn’t keep the game within reach, as the Padres struggled defensively.

“Just didn’t play well, from the first inning to the ninth,” said Jake Cronenworth, who committed an error and couldn’t come up with two other plays at second base.

Cronenworth and Machado are typically as smooth as they come defensively. Both struggled on Wednesday (though Machado did make an all-time defensive gem to end the fifth -- a diving stop with a throw across the diamond from his knees). Perhaps that’s the surest indicator this was an anomaly.

Said Machado: “I think we've been playing really good baseball -- doing a lot of good things that, over the long period of a year, if we're doing this, playing baseball like how we're playing now consistently, good things will come.”